Marquee tech clients now start serenading startups

Bengaluru: For the better part of two decades, chief information officers of some of the world's largest companies such as General Electric, Apple and Citigroup have looked at India as a low-cost destination to fuel their back-office software projects.

That narrative started to change over the past few years.

Later this week, top executives of some of the world's biggest technology buyers including Toyota Motor Corp, Colgate-Palmolive and telecom giant Bharti Airtel will visit Bengaluru and attend rapid-fire pitching sessions from domestic software product startups such as Aujas, Canvazify and FarEye.

After several years of outsourcing software development and maintenance to India's $160 billion IT industry, these technology customers are starting to leverage India for a different purpose - to meet some of the country's most innovative startups. "India is no longer seen as just a services economy," said Piyush Singh, former CIO of Great American Insurance Co and co-chair of the InTech50 event. "A lot of these large Fortune 500 companies have moved beyond leveraging India for IT sourcing and moved on to leveraging top technology talent from countries like India."

As traditional Fortune 500 companies and outsourcing customers such as Wal-Mart and Target face disruption from the emergence of new-age, tech-savvy competitors such as Amazon, India is increasingly becoming an important hunting ground for top technology talent.

Target, Lowe's and L Brands are increasingly launching corporate accelerator programmes to tap into local startups with disruptive new-age ideas and products that may help them gain an edge over newer rivals.

Over the course of the two-day event in Bengaluru, CIOs will listen to pitches from more than a dozen entrepreneurs and may choose to invest in or sign partnerships with these startups. Joining the CIOs will be Niti Aayog head Amitabh Kant and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani.

The top three startups will also receive an offer to join the accelerator programme of Silicon Valley-based business accelerator Plug and Play, which will then also introduce the winners to potential investors in the US.

"The top three startups - in terms of the relevance of their products to the US market - will get funded by Plug and Play. After that these startups will get exposure to 30-40 potential funders in the US - so as you can see, these startups will get huge exposure to take their ideas to the next level," said Singh.

Singh, however, added that the emergence of ecommerce startups in India over the past five years had taken some sheen away from India's emerging software product startup ecosystem.

"Ecommerce has sucked away a lot of funding that otherwise could have gone to these promising products startups - which is a little unfortunate. That being said, what we also see is the fact that Indian products startups are starting to get traction from new kinds of angel investors, which is a good sign," said Singh.

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